The Master smashes per-screen record, rest of box office still in decline

Paul Thomas Anderson’s kinda-sorta-about-Scientology epic The Masterbroke the record for per-screen average this weekend, earning $145,949 from five locations in New York and LA and beating out Moonrise Kingdom’s $130,749 per-location average in its opening earlier this year. (BoxOfficeMojo notes parenthetically that Kevin Smith’s Red State technically earned more per location, but did so using premium-priced tickets and a concert-style opening at Radio City Music Hall). But it wasn’t all good news for studios, because while the box office as a whole was up 27% over last weekend on the strength of Resident Evil: Retribution’s $21.1 million, it was still down 18% from the same weekend last year, and this weekend was the second worst of the year. At the risk of sounding overly reductive, outside of New York and LA, it was another weekend of movies no one really gave too much of a sh*t about and so they mostly stayed home. The ones who did show up gave Resident Evil a C+ Cinemascore, and that’s a self-selecting group of people who purposely paid money to see a Resident Evil movie.

Thus you have an interesting dichotomy. The weekend’s top wide releases largely represent the old strategy – led by Resident Evil 5 and a 3D re-released of Finding Nemo – of trying to squeeze every penny out of properties with built-in audiences, even as those built-in audiences slowly get bored of the product. The Master, meanwhile, is the second film to hit theaters from Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures. Ellison, the 26-year-old daughter of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, started by investing in movies like True Grit, and has since gone on to start Annapurna, financing such films as Lawless, The Master, Killing Them Softly, and David O. Russell’s next project.

One way to look at her is that she’s a bratty heiress playing around with her family’s money. The other way to look at her is that she’s a movie fan like us in the privileged position to finance the kind of movies she wants to see. I say this all the time when I’m not making cheap dick jokes, but the movie business has a ton of competition these days, and if it’s going to survive, people need to stop competing for a shrinking market (by churning out lazy sequels and remakes) and start actually expanding that market. The only way to do that is to get people excited about movies again. Excitement for going to the theater has been on the wane for some time now, even as everyone goes nuts for TV dramas like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad et. al. It seems like such a simple thing, but the Annapurna Pictures strategy seems to consist of trying to create a good product, and not just a profitable product. And that seems important to the viability of the medium in the long term. Anyone who does it will tell you, making movies is a terrible way to make money. So it follows that if you are going to do it, it should probably be because you like it. I’m not saying the Annapurna strategy – of financing movies that seem exciting and new, as opposed to the old, hey-you-pigs-seem-to-like-slop-so-here’s-some-more-slop strategy – is the future, but… it’d sure be nice if it was, wouldn’t it?

Going to a movie in this economy is expensive. I really only go 5-6 times a year now and it has to be a must see like The Avengers. More of the same does not make me want to spend $9 for a ticket +$10 for food and drink + gas + putting on pants.

I don’t even go that much, but I also share the same mentality of only bothering with a crowded theater for the must see movies, which for me usually only tend to be The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises.

More supporting evidence: The Possession = lazy remake of The Exorcist and every imitation of The Exorcist, Expendables 2 (though I liked it) and Bourne Legacy are sequels milking the public who (allegedly) want “more of the same, please.”

Wait…so someone who seems to have impeccable tastes (so far at least…I’m looking at you Pixar post-Cars 2), but HAPPENS to come from money, backs what we all love and adore (and pays your mortgage Mancini) and you have the audacity to (as one part of an argument) mock her? For shame Mancini, for shame. What are you, a 99%er?

I think you’re on to something there! This film’s been mis-advertised; it’s not a quirky drama about cults, it’s a sports movie about a champion farter who must MasterTM his craft in order to beat his arch rival, who also probably stole his girlfriend. Looking forward to that fart-training montage! Finally a training session I can take part in…!

Did it though? most people seem to have gotten into it AFTER season 1 happened. There will always be the ‘I totes read that bro’ people but then I believe half of them are just trying to be hipster about it.

Yeah, it definitely did. The fourth book (out in 2005) was a #1 NYT bestseller, and the series overall has had an incredibly extensive online presence since the days of dial up modems. Obviously the audience was smaller than it is now, but the first book was essentially the script for the first season of the show, which cut down on what was (obviously) the biggest risk for HBO. If that book hadn’t been written, and GRRM submitted GoT as a script to HBO (which isn’t out of the realm of possibility, since he used to be a TV writer), I feel like there’s not a great chance it gets made.

Anyway, Vince makes a solid argument, but if you want to be really precise about it, the problem isn’t necessarily the source material for these projects, it’s just that they are sloppily made. GoT is fucking awesome. Toy Story 3 was excellent, as was The Avengers.

I think that the whole theatre thing is eventually going the way of the dodo. I still go to see something in theatre probably every other week, but I’m usually left wondering why I bother. There is a select handful of films that I can say were definitely worth seeing in a theatre setting in the last couple of years, but with the drastic decrease in price of awesome TV’s and surround sound, I usually enjoy myself more at home. And I don’t need a payday loan to buy popcorn. I certainly don’t know the solution, but the appeal of going to the movie theatre is waning quickly. Maybe that particular medium is not the way to attract viewers anymore.

For me it’s hard to believe that the theater experience will ever “die out” as people say, it’s lasted this long, and it’s not like people are going to just quit being interested in movies. Yeah the medium is morphing and shifting, towards things like VUDU and Netflix, etc and cheaper technology (that can allow us better quality home cinemas) which will and has hurt the appeal of the theater I’m sure, but as for saying the theaters will disappear entirely, that’s hard to believe. Then again, I never thought video rental would disappear, and our town had two empty Blockbuster video’s to prove that wrong. People apparently love renting their movies outside a McDonald’s and Walgreen’s. If that isn’t a scary foreshadow into the world of Brawndo I don’t know what is.

There are many scary Brawndo foreshadowing events, but the demise of Blockbuster is not one of them. Those Viacom-owned cocksuckers killed off the independent video store with their shitty, mainstream selection and predatory late fees and finally died a much-deserved death. And it was Netflix as much as Redbox that killed them. Good fucking riddance, I say.

No, I didn’t mean Blockbuster going away was a foreshadowing event, I meant people getting their movies from a suicide booth outside every McDonald’s is kind of scary to me. You’ll have to forgive me, I live in a small town with seriously way too many McDonald’s and we have Redbox in front of all of them, and our two Walmart’s have them, and our 2 Walgreens. I see lines of people standing and waiting for their movie while there is a line of cars congested in the drive-thru.

No, I didn’t mean Blockbuster going away was a foreshadowing event, I meant people getting their movies from a suicide booth outside every McDonald’s is kind of scary to me. You’ll have to forgive me, I live in a small town with seriously way too many McDonald’s and we have Redbox in front of all of them, and our two Walmart’s have them, and our 2 Walgreens. I see lines of people standing and waiting for their movie while there is a line of cars congested in the drive-thru.